Against the Wind: A Life's Journey

By Rajni Kumar

'No doubt, the greatest event in my life was leaving England, the country of my birth, to follow the stirrings of my heartand to make my home in this wondrous and fascinating country -- India.'Thus begins the story of Nancie Joyce Margaret Jones with her arrival in Bombay on an ocean liner from London one morning in 1946. She had never travelled abroad until then, but now she was in love -- with Yudister Kumar, a fellow student from her university days who had to return home to immerse himself in India's freedom struggle, with no prospects of coming back to England. And so, at the young age of twenty-three, she decided to follow him to a strange and faraway country that, she did not know then, would transform her life forever.As she got married and took on the name Rajni, there were exciting developments on the professional front too. A series of unexpected circumstances led her to start a kindergarten in the living room of her Delhi house in 1955. And thus was born Springdales, which burst upon the educational scenario with vibrancy, dovetailing much of the ethos and culture of the new India into its philosophy.Now, at the wholesome age of ninety-six -- the school having grown to four in India and one in Dubai, with several thousand students on the rolls and an enviable reputation for education -- Rajni Kumar looks back on her extraordinary life in Against the Wind.Observant and vivacious, it is a memoir that is a testament as much to her lifelong work in education as to the spirit of romance and daring with which she set foot in a new country all those decades ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Oct 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9789353571337

Rajni Kumar

RAJNI KUMAR has worked for more than sixty years in the field of education in India. Now the Chairperson of Springdales Education Society, she started the school in 1955 and worked as Founder Principal until her retirement in 1988. She has received a number of national and international recognitions for her work, including the Padma Shri in 2011.

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Preface

NINETY-SIX IS not exactly the right age to write one’s memoirs. Memory fades, and it is difficult to record one’s life with accuracy over such a long period of time. In fact, I wonder whether there is any right age to write them, and whether they should be written at all!

Frankly, I did start penning down my thoughts a few years back, but then I stopped as I felt that I am neither a celebrity with the ability to excite thousands of fans with all kinds of wonder-packed stories about a starlit life, nor a spiritual being who can give inspiration to people on how to live their lives! I am just a humble teacher.

But I am getting more and more pressured by those who know me, especially my students, that having lived through nine decades of life in this eventful world of ours – two in England and seven in India – I should pen down my life-story before I reach the end of Shakespeare’s seventh age of man – sans teeth, eyes, taste, everything!

So, in deference to their wishes I am presenting my memoirs, with apologies for any errors accruing on account of age and confusion of mind.

No doubt the greatest event in my life was leaving England, the country of my birth, to follow the stirrings of my heart and to make my home in this wondrous and fascinating country – India – with the man I loved. So this is where I shall begin my story.

Rajni Kumar

New Delhi

August 2019

PART I

1

Arrival in India

Bombay, 1946

THERE WAS an enormous hustle and bustle as the P&O liner S.S. Chusan drew into the quayside. It had docked earlier than anyone had expected, and in the grey morning mist the contours of the Gateway of India rising from the sea so majestically seemed a little frightening. I leaned over the railing and watched the fascinating sight of the dockworkers shoving things around, getting the gangways into place and shouting at each other with great gusto. On deck the passengers were busy collecting their possessions and making their fond farewells after having spent three weeks in close proximity with each other. It had been a novel experience to travel by sea from London. Apart from a short ferry trip across the English Channel to the Netherlands in 1938 on a school exchange programme, I had never been able to travel abroad. The Second World War had broken out in 1939 and that had confined us for six years to Albion’s shores, fighting for our very survival against the Nazis and fascist forces overpowering Europe.

The S.S. Chusan was a large ocean liner of the P&O (Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation) Company, very elegant and luxurious with its ballrooms, dining room, swimming pool, game rooms and libraries. There was no first or second class and all amenities and facilities were open to all. It had been so pleasurable sitting out on deck, reading and sunbathing, playing tennis and other deck games, also taking part in the various socializing programmes arranged for us in the evening. It was one of the first liners after the War to go through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea instead of traversing the Cape. I found Port Said, our first port of call, a fascinating place, full of colour and oriental smells. The quayside was packed with Egyptian salesmen shouting and gesticulating at us to buy their wares, especially their delicious Turkish Delight. We threw the money down and they sent the sweet boxes up to us on the pulleys. After some time we were allowed to disembark and walk on the quayside. But the atmosphere not being very congenial and with wily peddlers sidling up to you with their wares, sneakily pinching your backsides and more persistently trying to get you to buy their dirty postcards, I preferred to watch the sights and sounds from the deck itself.

Cruising down the Canal to the Red Sea and Aden was another experience. Since it was exceedingly hot, and with the sun mercilessly beating down upon us, most of the passengers deserted the open decks and took rest inside the ship or cooled down in the swimming pool. But everything being so new and exciting, I could not tear my eyes away from watching the changing scenery of this part of the world, and took great delight in looking at the irrigated land among the sides of the Canal, the palm trees and the camels, and the local population going about their daily chores.

One morning there was an announcement from the ship’s medical department that we would soon be reaching India and if there were any passengers on board who had not been inoculated against small pox and other infectious diseases, they must come to the medical room for inoculations. I had never been inoculated in my life, my mother being an advocate for home remedies, but they would not spare me, and I was heavily injected, landing up with a fever and a very swollen arm.

In those days, a lot of romanticizing went on during voyages at sea, and ours was no exception. On reaching Bombay I watched my countrywomen, who only the night before had danced romantically in full moonlight in the arms of the ship’s officers, tripping daintily down the gangway and falling once again into someone’s arms. This time, of course, it must have been their husbands for I could almost hear them mouthing voluptuously the sweet words, ‘Darling, how I have missed you!’

A small group of Indian men, fairly young in age, caught my eye staggering across the quayside to their waiting groups of uncles, aunts and cousins all gathered to give a hero’s welcome to their England-returned relatives, all of them being well-qualified economists, political scientists, lawyers or writers. I could hardly see their faces for the masses of garlands which were being piled up on their necks one after the other. This was followed by hands touching feet in Indian custom and kids dancing around eagerly waiting to receive one of the magical parcels which ‘Chachaji’ (father’s younger brother) or ‘Mamaji’ (mother’s brother) had brought from foreign lands.

So engrossed was I watching the scenes unfolding before my eyes that I never realized that the ship had all but cleared and there I was, alone on the deck! Where was the mysterious Mr Prem Sagar Gupta, the friend of my friend, who was to meet me at the dock? From the description in the letter I had received he would be a tall, thin, fair gentleman dressed in a white kurta and pyjama, but I could see no such person. I began to experience a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Suddenly a short, stocky, rather swarthy-skinned Indian appeared by my side. With a slight bow of respect, he asked, ‘Are you, by any chance, Miss Jones?’ I thought to myself, if he had a sense of humour or knowledge of history, he would have said, ‘Miss Jones, I presume?’ but obviously he was unfamiliar with the adventures of David Livingstone, the great explorer of Africa.

‘Yes, I am Miss Jones,’ I said, ‘and may I know who you are?’

He took a deep breath and, swelling out his chest, replied, ‘I am the nephew of my revered uncle, Mr M.L. Puri, the respected husband of my aunt by marriage – Mrs Sanyogta Puri. She is the sister of your would-be husband, Mr Yudister Kumar, and I have been asked by my revered uncle to meet you, my would-be aunt, and to see to your every need until you leave Bombay for the Punjab.’

All this was said in a most serious tone of voice without any kind of intonation, and I could hardly conceal my giggles. Still I was so grateful not to be left alone in this unfamiliar city, particularly since Mr Gupta had failed to arrive on the scene. ‘Oh, thanks very much, Mr Puri. It’s awfully nice of you,’ I replied. ‘If we could go now and take my things from the hold, then we could leave and perhaps you could find me a hotel for the night. Mr Yudister Kumar had suggested in his letter that the Taj would be too expensive, but there was a fairly reasonably priced hotel called Greens that might be suitable.’

‘Don’t worry, I shall find you suitable accommodation, Miss Jones,’ said the very proper Mr Puri. ‘Please, come with me.’

And taking my hand luggage, he preceded me down the gangway on to the quayside.

We collected from the hold my big tin suitcase containing all my precious possessions that I had brought with me from London. It contained my collection of Western classical music records, my books, photographs and clothes, and a pile of Yudister’s letters written to me after his return to India explaining every possible detail of Punjabi life and culture. Little did I know that a year later I would lose them all with the communal riots arising from the partition of India and the looting that took place alongside. The porters loaded my luggage on the tonga, the horse-driven carriage used in those days, and we wended our way through the city. Some of the little boys who were at the harbour and to whom I had thrown a few coins followed behind, running barefoot on the dusty road.

The sights and sounds of Bombay during that first ride from the docks was something unimaginable, but Yudister had fully prepared me for the poverty, the chaotic traffic, the milling crowds, the vibrancy of this throbbing centre of trade and commerce – so for me there was no culture shock. Moreover, I was so taken up with my own situation that I had little thought for much else. Perhaps the most surprising thing for me was to look at a sea of people all dressed in white cotton kurtas and pyjamas, and I wondered why during the day people preferred to go about in their night suits!

But the recollection of the low-grade hotel Mr Puri dumped me in is etched in my memory for ever. There was a huge bed in the centre of the room with two-inch strips of dirty canvas crisscrossing it and sagging in the middle. There was no bedding provided, not even a pillow on which to rest my head. Above the bed a rickety old fan whirled around at tremendous speed making a horrible noise. I was sure the blades covered with grime would fall off at any moment. There was no regulator to control the speed of the fan, so rather than have a mangled end on my first night in India I preferred to curl up in an ancient and musty armchair in the corner of the room and let the night pass.

There was a bathroom attached to the room but used by the adjoining room also. A quick look at the bathtub full of dirty water with scum around the edges, obviously not drained out by the previous guest, was enough to convince me that keeping my own dirt was perhaps better than adding on someone else’s. I decided to wait till morning and ask the hotel manager at breakfast time to clean the place up before I could take a bath.

Looking out of the window at the starry sky, I watched the poor of Bombay taking their sticks and pulling down their bundle of rags from the trees, where they had remained out of sight during the day, and spreading them out on the street for the night. One of the little urchins, who looked like the one who had followed me from the quayside, was asleep on the pavement without any covering at all.

It was 21 March 1946. Where had destiny brought me? Here I was, a young English girl of twenty-three, in this strange and unknown land where I knew no one except the man I had fallen so deeply in love with five years earlier. And he was in a sanatorium thousands of miles away in Punjab in a critical condition, suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis. At that time TB was considered to be a very deadly, wasting disease, and except for long periods of rest, eating a good protein diet and breathing the fresh air from the pine trees, there seemed to be very little else to help a patient survive. Streptomycin had not been discovered back then. What would become of me here if he died? I had no money even for my return fare to England. Would I be accepted by his family? Would I be able to adjust myself as an English girl in my new surroundings with all their Indian customs and ways of life so alien to me? Perhaps this had not been such a good idea after all ….

With these morbid thoughts running through my mind, and feeling very much alone, I could not hold back my tears. They flowed copiously down my cheeks. Neither could I sleep. I thought of home and the drawn faces of my mother and my father as they bade me farewell. How much agony I was causing them! What happens to a person when one falls so desperately in love? Everything, except your own intense feelings and desires for that one person, fades away into nothingness. I felt utterly ashamed of myself for being such a wretchedly ungrateful daughter. I was thankful when at last the dawn came, lifting not only the darkness of the night but removing my pessimism and despair.

The bright rays of the sun pouring in through the window next morning, and the stirrings of life on the streets of Bombay, found me stronger and able to cope with what the new day might bring. An optimist by nature and with all the energies of youth, I was ready to take India in my stride.

Mr Puri arrived at 9.00 a.m. He was wearing a khaki shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. I had two missions for him to complete for me, so I decided to accost him straight away.

‘Mr Puri, I hate to bother you, but do you think you could take me to a shop so that I can buy a sari? I would love to meet Mr Kumar’s family dressed in Indian clothes.’

He signalled his consent and said that as soon as the Khadi Bhandar opened he would take me there and I could get a simple silk sari which would be suitable for the cooler clime of Punjab.

Then I said, ‘Could you also take me to the headquarters of the Communist Party of India?’ I have a letter for them from the Hornsey Branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain and I have also to meet Yudister’s friends since Mr Prem Sagar Gupta did not turn up yesterday. They are Mr Romesh Chander and Mr Mohan Kumaramangalam – both members of the Communist Party of India.’

Suddenly I noticed Mr Puri stiffening up. He seemed almost about to bristle. Drawing himself up to his full height, which was not much on any account, he said in a most injured tone of voice, ‘I am sorry, Miss Jones, I cannot take you to the headquarters of the Communist Party of India. I am a member of the RSS – the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – a very loyal and devoted member. I cannot possibly be seen entering the HQ of the Communist Party of India.’

At that time a fresher from England, I simply did not understand these political complications in India and the difficulty that the poor man seemed to have in escorting me to the CPI office.

‘Mr Puri,’ I replied, ‘it’s quite all right if you don’t want to come inside. Just take me to the door and wait for me. I’ll not keep you waiting long.’

I could see him thinking about his duty to his ‘revered uncle’ and his ‘esteemed aunt’ by marriage, and my ‘would-be husband’ lying dangerously ill and whom this poor girl might never be able to marry!

Putting aside his ideological misgivings he took me to the party headquarters and dutifully waited outside until I had handed over the letters, met Yudister’s friends, and received my instructions as to what my programme would be on reaching Lahore. I must confess I made him wait for over an hour!

I shall never forget that first meeting with Romesh Chander and Mohan Kumaramangalam. I thought I had never seen in my life two such handsome young men, dressed in spotless white cotton kurta-pyjamas, sitting on the floor on a mattress covered with a beautifully starched white sheet and reclining against some equally spotless white bolsters. Later we were joined by a very apologetic Mr Prem Sagar Gupta. He had arrived at the docks the previous morning at the expected time of arrival only to find that the liner had anchored two hours earlier than scheduled and that all the passengers had left. Not knowing anything about Mr Puri, he had no way of finding me. He only hoped I would surface on my own, which of course I did, not forgetting the unexpected company I was with! But he seemed to be very relieved to find me there.

From Yudister’s friends I learnt the details of what had happened since his return from England – of which I had little knowledge.

Yudister’s mother apparently had been extremely bitter that her son, having returned as a barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, a graduate from the London School of Economics and an extra-mural scholar from Cambridge University, had arrived home dressed in simple khadi, carrying his rucksack on his back and his typewriter in his hand, all ready to join his friends in the left-wing movement of the Indian freedom struggle. He had spurned all offers of marrying ‘a suitable girl’ arranged by his mother and begun to live on a pittance of seventy-five rupees a month, travelling from village to village as part of the freedom movement. He finally landed up with virulent TB of the lungs! Instead of looking after him, his mother, bereft of any maternal love, had whisked him out of the house and sent him to a sanatorium with the words, ‘There goes the hearse.’

Although I knew about his illness and that he was in a sanatorium for TB, other details were unknown to me and I listened with some dismay at the turn of events, especially regarding his mother.

I was, however, cheered up when Romesh told me that Yudister’s father (actually his uncle, Mr Gowardhandass, who had adopted Yudister as his son and heir after the death of Yudister’s father) had been so incensed by the attitude of the old lady that he had also left the house along with his son. Having first arranged for Yudister’s treatment in the Gulab Rai TB Sanatorium in Model Town, Lahore, he had rented a house in the same area and was waiting for me to arrive.

I must have looked somewhat disturbed at what had been narrated. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Romesh, ‘my wife Perin has organized some kind of women’s commune in our house in Lahore and she and the party girls are living there and will look after you if you find it in any way inconvenient to live with his father.’

I knew that Gowardhandass was a respected Congressman and veteran of the freedom struggle in Punjab and I felt comforted that there was at least somebody in Yudister’s family as well as his friends ready to receive me.

Apart from family matters, there were many other things which we talked about, not least the state of the freedom struggle which was drawing to its climax, and the support of the Communist Party of Great Britain to the Indian freedom movement. I referred them particularly to the interest shown by two of my friends in the Hornsey Branch of the Party – G.S. Jones, or Jonah, as he was better known, and Maud Rogerson, who after some years married Peter Koenneman, secretary of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka.

I also gave them a graphic account of my first brush with racism coming over in the P&O liner. As chance would have it, on arrival at the Tilbury Docks I had happened to see a good friend, Rusi Dhondy, from the Cambridge days, his English wife, May, and their baby daughter, who were also embarking for India. I was overjoyed to think I would have some company during the voyage. Rusi took my tickets and arranged for my cabin and a seat at the same dining table as theirs.

After the liner had sailed and we went to the dining room for dinner, we suddenly realized that the main dining room, elegantly furnished and glittering with chandeliers, was filled with Europeans, and all the Indians had been accommodated in the small adjoining room. May and I were the only English people sitting there. Immediately a meeting was called after dinner in Deck E, where most of the Indians were given cabins! A strong protest was launched at this obvious instance of racism. A delegation waited upon the captain and expressed the feelings of the Indian community. Of course, the captain took the opportunity of saying that an English lady, Miss Jones, was accommodated there also, but we soon disposed of that argument as they knew very well that my booking had been made in the name of Rusi Dhondy.

Then the captain appealed to the Indian passengers not to make a big issue of it, and that since seats had now been allocated it would be very difficult to dislocate people. But he assured everyone that at Port Said, after some people had disembarked, they would fill up the vacant seats in the main dining hall with passengers of Indian origin. Having made the point, the Indians left it at that, but I had received my first taste of what it feels like to be discriminated against, on grounds of racism, and felt it was worthwhile discussing it with my newfound friends.

I left the CPI headquarters to find Mr Puri waiting patiently on the other side of the street. My talks had taken rather longer than expected. I apologized but did not tell him anything of the conversation that we had been engaged in, or about the personal family problems – neither did he ask. He already knew that he had to put me on the train that evening which would take me to Jullundur (now Jalandhar) in Punjab. His responsibility would then be over. From there ‘his revered uncle and esteemed aunt by marriage’ would accompany me to their ancestral home in Hoshiarpur before escorting me to Lahore, and eventually to Yudister.

Returning to my hotel room for an afternoon siesta, I wondered at the irony of fate and the wanton tricks that life plays upon us. My dream of coming to India, to the Orient, had at last materialized, but under such circumstances that one could never have anticipated. For sure, I was not destined for a smooth and uneventful life.

I began to think to myself of the role that destiny plays in our lives. It is said that future events cast their shadows before them. Did the rumours that circulated about my birth and which were often narrated to me as I grew up have anything to do with my destiny? My mind began to wander into the past, to my parents, to the place where I was born, my childhood days, the agonies and the ecstasies of growing up in England and the experience of living through six years of a devastating world war.

2

Early Life in England

London, 1923

IWAS born in Highgate London on 5 March 1923, the youngest child of May Allington and David Thomas Jones. My mother came from a simple family of farmers hailing from Sudbury Suffolkshire. She was not very educated but had great talent in music and played the first violin in the Alexandria Palace Symphony Orchestra when she was still in her teens. In her early twenties and after marriage to my father, she was inundated with pupils, teaching them piano, violin and cello. How we, her children, loathed coming home from school and hearing some five-year-old strumming ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ on the piano or an eight-year-old trying hard to cope with Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on his scratchy violin! But it was those music lessons that enabled her to keep her large family going during the hard days of the Depression when my father was so often unemployed.

My father, David Thomas Jones, was the son of a county squire hailing from Fishguard in Pembrokeshire in the southwest of Wales. His father had a large acreage of land with many labourers and servants and, having lost his first wife, married Harriet, the seamstress of the village, a young and beautiful woman. David was the offspring of that union. After his father died, the haughty step-sisters turned his mother and him out of the big house, from where they received no inheritance due to them. He was brought up by his mother’s brother, Thomas Griffiths, a burly farmer of lowly origin. My father had to leave the school where he was studying and take up the trade of carpentry and French polishing. Later he came to London to seek his fortunes as a furniture-maker and lived as a tenant in the house of my mother. Attracted to each other by my mother’s physical beauty and my father’s handsome, manly features and sharing a common love of music – my father having a good tenor voice – they soon fell in love, married and had a large family. I was the last and seventh-born, and my mother, feeling somewhat guilty of having brought so many children into the world, tightened her corsets and flounced her long skirts and never told anyone, not even the neighbours, that she was again ‘enceinte’, until the confinement was due and the midwife called.

My second sister, Olive, was quite horrified and made it be known that six children was enough but seven was quite unacceptable for any decent family. Olive was the intellectual one of the family, a student of English literature at Queen Mary’s College, London, a feminist, socialist and ardent follower of the Suffragette Movement campaigning for votes for women. She died in 1926 at the age of twenty of Addison’s Disease, the name for the wasting away of the adrenal glands, for which at that time there was no cure. It was the greatest tragedy of my parents’ life.

On the day of my birth, the neighbour’s little son, William, seeing the mop of black hair on my head, and my dark Welsh skin, inherited from my father, went running around the neighbourhood telling everyone that Mrs Jones had given birth to a black baby.

As a consequence, inquisitive neighbours made it a point to call in on the family ostensibly to inquire about the mother and baby’s health, but in fact to convince themselves of the veracity of little William’s claim. The tongues of the gossip-mongers began to wag! But to no purpose, for I was, for sure, a British Anglo-Saxon baby.

As a child I often had to suffer from having such a dark and swarthy skin, for when I stayed with my friends with their fair skins and blond hair, their mothers would vigorously scrub my neck and knees, convinced that there were layers of dirt to be removed. Standing out as a brunette, in contrast to the large number of blonde children in my class, I began to feel much more of an affinity with darker people, so perhaps it fitted into the pattern of my life that whenever we had to stand up at school and speak extempore on a topic, I would inevitably choose racial equality for Africans, or the culture of the Orient, or select Rangoon in Burma or the Taj Mahal at Agra as the places I would most like to visit. I felt drawn to India and all things Indian.

I was fortunate to have as my godmother Rene Wood, the best friend of my sister Olive. They were both at Camden Grammar School for Girls and later at Queen Mary’s College together. Rene was devastated at the death of her best friend, and from that time adopted me as her godchild. As my godmother she took responsibility for my cultural upbringing, getting tickets for the cultural events and for dance performances in the West End of London and to the Old Vic theatre to enjoy Shakespearian dramas. Her father being associated with Harraps Publishing House, I was always the first to get copies of new children’s books, such as the Milly Molly Series, the William books, The Wind in the Willows and the poems by A.A. Milne: ‘When I Was Very Young’ and ‘Now I Am Six’. I used to read the same poems and stories to my daughter, Jo, when she was young, and at a later stage other favourites like ‘The Story of a Nobody’ and the ‘Inscrutable Indian’, bedtime being the special time for reading together.

When I came to live in India I found a lot of similarities between members of my Indian family and my Welsh family, both